Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range communication connection technology based on a radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. A user can implement short-range communication, such as visual, secure, and contactless information exchange and transaction payment, between two terminal devices simply by using one terminal device to tap or approach another terminal device. At present, NFC mainly works at a frequency of 13.56 MHz and can support four transmission rates: 106 kbit/s, 212 kbit/s, 424 kbit/s, and 848 kbit/s, and an effective communication range is approximately 0 cm to 20 cm, where a typical value is 4 cm.
Due to a low data transmission rate, NFC is suitable for exchange of a small amount of data. In other words, if NFC is used for transmission of a large file, a problem that user experience is affected by a low transmission speed appears. Therefore, an NFC forum proposes a connection handover technology based on NFC.
The so-called connection handover technology based on NFC refers to: two terminals that support both NFC and another communication connection can exchange, by using NFC, connection configuration information of another communication connection manner in a peer-to-peer (P2P) mode, so that another communication connection can be established between the two terminals. The another communication connection manner includes Bluetooth (BT), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), and the like.
However, in a case in which devices have relatively large sizes and relatively fixed positions, it may not be convenient for two terminals that support both NFC and another communication connection to directly tap or approach each other. Therefore, in the Connection Handover Technical Specification Version 1.3 (“CH 1.3 Specification”), the NFC forum proposes that a mobile terminal (for example, a mobile phone) supporting NFC may be used as a handover mediator to assist two terminals to establish another communication connection.
Specifically, assuming that a handover mediator is intended to assist in establishing a Bluetooth connection between a first terminal and a second terminal, according to the CH 1.3 Specification, the handover mediator needs to: first tap or approach the first terminal and the second terminal separately, to separately acquire Bluetooth connection configuration information of the first terminal and the second terminal; and then send the Bluetooth connection configuration information of the first terminal to the second terminal, so that the second terminal can initiate a Bluetooth connection initiate request to the first terminal based on the received Bluetooth connection configuration information.
According to the prior art, in a case in which a handover mediator M is used to assist, based on NFC, a device A to establish communication connections to N (N≧2) devices B, the handover mediator M needs to move back and forth between the device A and the N devices B at least N times: specifically, the handover mediator M taps or approaches the device A once, and the handover mediator M taps or approaches a first device B1 once; the handover mediator M taps or approaches the device A once, and the handover mediator M taps or approaches a second device B2 once; . . . the handover mediator M taps or approaches the device A once, and the handover mediator M taps or approaches a Nth device BN once. These operations obviously take a lot of time and effort, especially in a case in which the main device A and a target device B are far from each other.
Besides, according to the CH 1.3 Specification, any terminal can ensure that all carriers in the message carrier list remain in a connectable state for a period of time (for example, 2 minutes) after sending a handover mediation response, which is very likely to cause a misconnection between multiple devices that are successively tapped by the handover mediator M within the 2 minutes. For example, in the 2-minute connectable state, the handover mediator M taps or approaches the device A once, taps or approaches the first device B1 once, taps or approaches the second device B2 once, and taps or approaches the device A once; in this case, a misconnection between the first device B1 and the second device B2 may be caused.